My thoughts on defense.

02/13/2017

More Climate Change Fraud; "NOAA Cheated and Got Caught"

Seems yet again the Global Warming Alarmist Industry has manipulated the "science" part of the "settled science" to push for signatures on the 2015 Paris Agreement, a massive plan to tax the life out of the US and UK economies in the name of saving the planet. The Daily Mail tells us the story.

Once again, we have a scam by the US Government perpetrated at taxpayer expense. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) produced the so-called "version 4 data set", along with the "pausebuster" paper to which the deliberately misleading numbers contributed.

The contentious paper at the heart of this furore – with the less than accessible title of Possible Artifacts Of Data Biases In The Recent Global Surface Warming Hiatus – was published just six months before the Paris conference by the influential journal Science.

It made a sensational claim: that contrary to what scientists have been saying for years, there was no ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the early 21st Century.

How did NOAA make its case? With some statistical sleight-of-hand which violates ethical and scientific norms. Again.

It turns out that when NOAA compiled what is known as the ‘version 4’ dataset, it took reliable readings from buoys but then ‘adjusted’ them upwards – using readings from seawater intakes on ships that act as weather stations.

They did this even though readings from the ships have long been known to be too hot.

No one, to be clear, has ‘tampered’ with the figures. But according to Bates, the way those figures were chosen exaggerated global warming.

And without this new dataset there would have been no Pausebuster paper. If, as previous sea water evidence has shown, there really has been a pause in global warming, then it calls into question the received wisdom about its true scale.

Then there is the matter of timing. Documents obtained by this newspaper show that NOAA, ignoring protests by Dr Bates, held back publication of the version 4 sea dataset several months after it was ready – to intensify the impact of the Pausebuster paper. It also meant more sceptical voices had no chance to examine the figures.

In the words of Lamar Smith, (R-TX), ‘NOAA cheated and got caught’. Precisely. For those who admonish my skepticism about global warming and man's responsibility for it, I will hear incessantly that I am a fool to "ignore the overwhelming evidence". News flash: If you had "overwhelming evidence", there would have been no Climategate in 2009, nor NOAA culpability in 2017.

Last time we were lectured by the anti-capitalist environmental Nazis, it was in the 1970s about global cooling. The next ice age was a certainty, "settled science", in fact, unless we stifled capitalism, expropriated from the US taxpayers, and redistributed wealth. Of late, naturally, those same far-left anti-capitalists try and tell us that no such global cooling scare really happened. As if we can't remember what was said and written forty years ago. (URR here.)

Comments

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As they say on late night TV: "But wait, there's more!"

Last week a post on the "Watts Up With That" climate blog is an entry describing new software rolled out by NOAA in 2013 that processes the climate data. It resulted in lowering past temps and raising current ones. The article shows comparison graphs of average temps for 3 states in the US. No wonder we suddenly had so many hottest ever years.

When Al and Leo and the rest of the virtue signalers move out of their mansions into two-bedroom ranch houses, trade in their limos for Smart Cars, and start flying commercial, I might take them a little more seriously.

When you say "The next ice age was a certainty, "settled science"" what you actually mean is that a dozen or so references to it can be found in old newspaper clippings.

I read the links you posted and apart from the study of multi-decade cooling which was actually good science there is nothing in this story. A couple of nutjobs pushed it further but in the end nobody believed it because they couldn't back it up with hard data. This is very different to current studies where we have 10s of thousands of peer reviewed papers backed by hard science from nearly every nation on earth. Just because you can't understand the data doesn't mean that it is wrong. If you do understand the data and still think it's wrong then write a paper yourself and prove it.

You suspect a conspiracy where there is none. The world is getting warmer and it's our fault. This has been proven beyond doubt. The only thing left to argue about is how we deal with it and this is where I agree with you. The solutions are crap and carbon credits and extra taxes will just be used to steal more from the little guy so that the rich can get ever richer.

Barry, you need to spit out the kool-aid and back away from the Al Gore poster. I was taught the "next ice age" alarmism for several years in school in the 1970s, complete with the proclamations of "scientific agreement" and "overwhelming evidence" and the like. To say that the National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Academy of Science, and the same people at Univ of East Anglia that pulled the 2009 fraud did not support the "next ice age" theory simply isn't true. They all did. And now try and make it seem as if they didn't.

None of the "hard science" you try and claim is anything of the sort. Otherwise, they wouldn't have to manipulate numbers to falsify results, yet again. So please, simply repeating long-tired platitudes is not much of an argument. Which is why what NOAA did to further the cause for which they have no real evidence is so egregious.

"Just because you can't understand the data doesn't mean that it is wrong. If..."

The 'data' is a bad joke. Considering that the number of samples is at best incomplete, relying on basically a small number of tree rings and ice cores. We didn't even know of the existence of the jet stream until 1945, and our knowledge of the oceans is still woefully incomplete.

And, of course, all those thousands of scientists and their "hard science" cannot tell us what the correct temperature of the Earth is. For all they know we may actually be below the equilibrium temperature.

Barry, it has been shown, repeatedly, that the "data" that supposedly supports AGW/Climate change is bogus. That "paper" has been written many times, and the AGW high priests have ignored them.

If you want to keep swallowing the AGW lie, that's your business. But don't expect reasonable people, who not only know better, but know what science is, and how it is done, to jump off the cliff with you.

Constant and well-publicized massaging of the data, ignoring the urban heat island effect, constant blaring of "hottest ever" events wherein the difference is well within the level of error, use of a feedback formula from book on electronic circuits, models which show constant & regular predictions well above actual data, inability to explain the natural changes such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age along with ignoring actual history of interglacial cooling... Yea, sure, the science it both incontrovertible and settled.

And the claim that the "coming ice age" was a small number of articles? Does the cover of TIME Magazine count as insignificant? Were you even around back in the 1970s? Many of us were, and we remember more than "a dozen or so references" ... "in old newspaper clippings."

It's nice that you admit that the cooling was established. When will you admit that what's actually occurring is set of cycles of cooling/warming over several decades with a slight upward trend?

Is the overall climate temperature average increasing? See previous graf? Is is human-caused? Nowhere anything remotely resembling solid proof except some modeling scenarios. It's the CA in CAGW that gives folks like us reason to pause.

I find it instructive that the CAGW crowed went from "global warming" to "climate change." Apparently even the dumbest low-information voter was picking up on the pause, especially with the colder winters (remember that cooling/warming cycle I mentioned?) so they dropped "warming." "Climate change" or the more recent "extreme climate" mantra are quite convenient in that one may claim any unusual event as evidence. Severe winter? Climate change! Hot summer? Climate change! Drought? Climate change! Floods? Climate change!

The other big hint is the whole "denier" approach. When you shift from disagreeing with the other side to shutting them up, you've lost the argument.

Here's the conundrum. Man-made global warming, that part is true but not factual. Man made the instruments to measure the temperature to a thousandths of a degree, man can only say to the tenth of a degree, and be sort of accurate. And then they smoothed the data. By using a confident method showing only increases, and having an error rate beyond the input number. That makes no sense. If your error rate is larger then your input, you are asking the wrong question. But the science is settled. With the error rate larger how can you honestly say warmer, or colder? It could be either, or none? I wonder what if their employer did the same? Paycheck or none.

Sorry, Doug. The POPSCI article contains a weak and misleading justification for using a preponderance of data from at-sea intake of ships, known to be both less accurate and far more widely varied, rather than using water temp readings from buoys, the readings from which are both more accurate and consistent. The author assures us that Karl corrected for the errors in the intake measurements, but provides no information to that effect. With the wide variations from ambient temperature of the various intakes on the ships, error is exponentially compounded compared to using buoy measurements with a far more defined margin of error. After the East Anglia fiasco in 2009, where manipulation of data and models was widespread, and with the subsequent denials of the "climate scientists" of the global cooling hysteria of 40 years ago, the manipulation of climate data that obliterates major weather and climate events of this century (Iceland's deep freeze from 1966-68) from the historical record, why again should I be giving the benefit of the doubt to those who have proven again and again to be less than forthright in their scientific studies? None of such methods would pass serious peer review in any other scientific pursuit.